Chris Tausanovitch is associate professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He studies the relationship between constituency opinion and the actions of elected officials. He is the coauthor, with John Sides and Lynn Vavreck, of The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy(Princeton University Press, 2022).
Tausanovitch was co-PI of Nationscape (with Lynn Vavreck), which surveyed more than 500,000 Americans during the 2020 election cycle. He is co-PI of the American Ideology Project (with Christopher Warshaw), producing estimates of the political ideology of every state, congressional district, state legislative district, county, and medium-sized city in the United States.
His work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, and Political Analysis, among other outlets. His research has been covered by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Houston Chronicle, the Economist, Forbes, Vox, and USA Today, and he has written for the New York Times and the Washington Post. In addition to being an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, he is a former American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow and recipient of the UCLA Hellman Fellowship and the UCLA Center for American Politics and Public Policy Kenneth L. Sokoloff Fellowship.
His project, “Why Do Moderate Voters Elect Polarized Candidates?,” investigates a central paradox of American politics: How is it that a relatively moderate public is represented by increasingly polarized elected officials? In a series of planned studies, Tausanovitch will test some of the most compelling arguments for why voters support candidates whose policy stances they do not agree with.
May 2024
